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2 Years of 2 Weeks To Limit the Spread
Governors and mayors have used COVID to stretch their emergency powers way beyond any reasonable interpretation. For example, California Gov. Gavin Newsom has extended his March 4, 2020, emergency declaration to March 31, 2022. It’s time to reign in their executive overstretch. I propose that cities and states pass laws that:
1. Limit the executive to one 30-day emergency per year.
2. Require a one-month extension be approved by a majority vote in the legislature.
3. Stipulate that any extension beyond that requires a two-thirds majority in the state house and senate (apart from Nebraska).
The constitution is not abrogated because some executive thinks that it is inconvenient. One shudders to think what they would do in a real pandemic such as occurred in 1918. We need to pass these laws now.
Published in Law
Good luck with that.
I agree BUT this would just become a writ of tyranny for 30 days+.
This is a failure of the political process, and laws are no protection against a people and government which refuses to rein in abuse of existing laws. Recall the debate about a Bill of Rights as, by listing some, it might produce the impression that those listed were all.
We’re so screwed.
I’m not a fan of emergency powers and would rather just abolish them. They always become a blank slate for authoritarians to do whatever they want.
Executives are able to make hard decisions because legislators – whose are legally responsible for making those decisions – happily let them; in this way they a) don’t suffer fallout from making an unpopular decision, and b) don’t have to do the work involved in making a group decision.
Executives come and go, but legislating is for life.
In Ohio, the state Legislature passed a bill last Spring that limits the Governor’s authority to declare health mandates on his own. (In reality it is the State Health Director who makes the health mandates and the governor just backs her up, but for simplicity I am referring to it as coming from the governor)
Governor Mike DeWine is a Republican and was one of the first governors to enact a lockdown of a State in the U.S. Just like many other lockdown measures, his overstayed its welcome by many months, long after we had “flattened the curve.” Ohio citizens became weary of the lockdown pretty fast and pressured the Republican Legislature to do something for a long time, which they finally did last Spring. The bill requires a vote of the Legislature to enact health mandates instead of the centralized authority of the sole health director or the governor. Not wanting to give up power, Governor DeWine vetoed it but it was easily overridden with a 2/3rds majority with help from democrat legislators.
DeWine, pretending to look as if he was still in control, lifted Ohio’s mask mandate just two weeks before the bill took effect, thus avoiding an embarrassing vote in the legislature that would have taken away his mandate by force. Dewine now thinks he can win re-election next year based on his “leadership” during the Covid Pandemic. I think he should ask Andrew Cuomo for pointers in writing a book.
Gregg Abbott was politically beat up so badly over COVID that he proposed legislation to limit his own emergency powers.
Let me also point out that one thing working against this sort of legislation is that the alternative to power vested in the hands of the executive is power in the hands of the legislature, and many if not most state legislatures don’t want the responsibility. Imagine at the Federal level how quickly the house and senate would run away from it.
Illinois House Republicans have introduced legislation requiring legislative approval of any disaster declaration. If you follow Illinois politics, you’ll know what its chances are.
Please add language along these lines to this one:
If it is really an emergency, none of this should matter to the good public servant.
I came here for this!
And what’s going to be interesting is if the Supreme Court strikes down the Federal Mandate because then, in Cook County and Chicago, you will need to provide proof of “full vaccination” to go to a gym, but not to go to work in an office. Which totally makes sense when you think about how I spend about an hour and a half in a gym and nine/ten hours in the office.
I’d add one idea to the general discussion: We have to move past this idea of “toughing it out” and showing up at the office when you’re sick. That’d provide a huge benefit to everyone whether we’re talking about Covid or the flu. But that will require a lot of people to get comfortable with something alien to them.
How about 10 days? There is no disaster that can prevent a legislative body for acting within 10 days. Some enabling emergency session might be required.
I generally like Gov. Abbott; however, his handling of COVID and the snowpocalypse was sub par and has hurt his credibility with me. I suspect I will still wind up voting for him because any republican is better than any democrat. I may lodge a protest vote against him in the primary.
“Stop me before I control again!”
Under normal circumstances I’d agree with you. In fact, I’d say the longer we go before going into session the better, given what passes for legislation in this state. But we’ve had almost 2 years of serial disaster declarations and executive orders, and the Governor is cutting into bone.
Anyone remember how Rick Perry got beaten up over his HPV vaccine mandate while Governor of Texas?
I do. He still got off too easy.
I loved the way he backpedaled on the mandate when he ran for President . . .
The constitution is not abrogated because some executive thinks that it is inconvenient. One shudders to think what they would do in a real pandemic such as occurred in 1918. We need to pass these laws now.
Been gone from Ricochet for a while so hopefully I quoted this correctly.
Regarding this suggestion, my response would be “One would think”. Oregon has just such a law. Not exactly the same as the framing in the post, but close enough. In mid-2020 multiple people from Eastern Oregon (In Western Oregon I believe the only conservatives are all Ricochet members, if that tells you of our proliferation) took Gestapo Kate to the Oregon Supreme Court over that very law. It would have been a moot point anyway, because the state legislature is so deep blue it’s indiscernible from jet black and would have just turned around and granted her the tyrannical powers she sought. It never made it that far, however. You see, when you live in a a dystopia like Oregon, the state Supreme Court is every bit as impenetrably Democrat as every other corner of the government. They quickly ignored the fact that she was acting illegally and held the door open for her as she passed through the door to the throne room.
DING. This gets back to the heart of emergency powers, which is that they are to be exercised in an emergency, and one of the definiing characteristics of an emergency is its “emergent” nature, that it develops more quickly than the normal means can react sensibly. In American politics, the executive is rarely a UN-style “general secretary”, but a co-equal branch. It is right and good for executive branchers to — you know — execute, as in get things done. And in an emergency, some of those things are decision that would normally behandled by the legislature.
Our problem is not a bad system, but a system gamed to meaninglessness by bad actors. Those bad actors are increasingly fearless, in fact rewarded, for their transgressions.
Only a wildfire fury will begin to right this ship — more laws are ballast at worst, and more likely grist for the abusers’ mill.
Conversely… it may be that we are so debased that our system must change. But all options in this direction are bad. It is a people begging for tyranny, whether of laws or of men. So I support the obverse.
Haven’t read the comments yet, but here’s a headline from Gateway Pundit:
HUGE. CDC Withdraws Use of PCR Test for COVID and Finally Admits the Test Can Not Differentiate Between the Flu and COVID Virus
So NOW we know why the flu hasn’t been making headlines for being rampant for two years.
And now maybe we the same standard of “excess deaths” being manipulated to promote the New Vaccine of the Year status.
If true, this is astounding. A game-changer. My wife ran those tests for months at a main hospital network. She was recently roped back into the PCR testing process recently due to the flooding of cases.
https://www.cdc.gov/csels/dls/locs/2021/07-21-2021-lab-alert-Changes_CDC_RT-PCR_SARS-CoV-2_Testing_1.html
Including:
“After December 31, 2021, CDC will withdraw the request to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) of the CDC 2019-Novel Coronavirus (2019-nCoV) Real-Time RT-PCR Diagnostic Panel, the assay first introduced in February 2020 for detection of SARS-CoV-2 only. CDC is providing this advance notice for clinical laboratories to have adequate time to select and implement one of the many FDA-authorized alternatives.
“Visit the FDA website for a list of authorized COVID-19 diagnostic methods. For a summary of the performance of FDA-authorized molecular methods with an FDA reference panel, visit this page.
“In preparation for this change, CDC recommends clinical laboratories and testing sites that have been using the CDC 2019-nCoV RT-PCR assay select and begin their transition to another FDA-authorized COVID-19 test. CDC encourages laboratories to consider adoption of a multiplexed method that can facilitate detection and differentiation of SARS-CoV-2 and influenza viruses.”
The alert is dated July 21, so not exactly breaking news. Or am I missing something?
https://www.cdc.gov/csels/dls/locs/2021/07-21-2021-lab-alert-Changes_CDC_RT-PCR_SARS-CoV-2_Testing_1.html
It’s promoted as “just released”. I just read this today. Did you know about this lab alert before December?
I was aware of the Dec. 17 lab alert, but not this one.
I was not.
Neither was I, until today.
Good luck with that. Even in hear in Florida they updated the Emergency Act. They expanded the powers and gave the governor the ability to have unlimited Health executive orders. The law did not allow for health reasons before. The only thing they did was allow the state legislators to overrule the Governor by a resolution. Which is meaningless unless the legislator is in session. Only the Governor or 2/3rds of the legislator can call a special session.
So basically, the Legislator can stop an executive order only during the 60 day session every year. Then the Governor can reimplement an executive order that is basically the same.
Our country is in trouble because of Republicans. They never learn their lesson from experience and pass laws to stop tyranny. They just look the other way or pretend to care but instead give themselves more power.
Desantios and the Florida legislator have no principles and don’t think if they have the power its evil. Our country is so screwed because everyone thinks law-wise we are better and we really are not much worse at the state law level than most blue states. This is typical of most Red states it’s just Republicans are less likely to abuse the law than Democrats.
My wife says that the PCR tests do differentiate between Flu and Covid. Perhaps the wording of the CDC memo was misinterpreted when they suggest using tests that differentiate between the two.
The above sandwich board says it all.
Sure blame governors, blame Biden, blame local public health officers.
But ya know something? Even a blind squirrel occasionally finds a nut. Anyone looking at health “experts'” statements abt the plandemic easily realizes that our blind squirrels have been contradictory at best & outright wrong about the masks, lockdowns, efficacy and safety of vaccines, their reasoning on suppression of ivermectin, & HCQ, their reasoning on mandating that drs NOT treat patients until they are in the hospital and using ventilators..
It is impossible once an individual does actual research outside of the “official narrative” not to realize:
The major problem with Fauci: Normally the Acting Head of any governmental agency as powerful as NIAID whose personnel track record includes the 1988 to 1993 killing of 17,000 AIDS patients due to his refusal to release an actual semi safe, cheap & effective remedy, bactrim, as he rather preferred to spend 15 months with jerry rigged clinical trials that fraudulently allowed the approval & release of a more expensive and much more dangerous drug to be released, & then once distributed, the “Gold Standard Product” AZT went on to kill another 300,000 Americans, then that individual should have been removed from his office.
Instead that official was given additional powers over the past 20 years. Now he controls 80 billion dollars in funding. The narrative this murderous corrupt piece of expletive desires is what scientists & researchers around the world now pay heed to. So to ensure that they keep their funding, they slant their trials the way they know their grants will be approved.
Industry has corrupted science. Industry has garnered enough billions of $$s of profits that their ad monies ensure the media promotes the narrative as well.
Once COVID was released from the Wuhan Institute, Fauci followed the exact same play book that he used for AIDS in the late 1980’s. He saw to it that the remedies were suppressed. He saw to it that hospital administrators received massive pay outs when COV patients were admitted, and again when patients got put on ventilators, an event with a 80% chance of killing off that person.
Fauci oversaw the introduction of the kidney killing remdesivir as being the first drug that he allowed to be used for COV patients in 90% of the hospitals and clinics in the USA.
He promoted the vaccines as being “the only possible way to stop the transmission of COVID,” assuring the public that those getting the vaxxes would not get infected & would not spread COVID. (Statements that are total lies, w/ the added problems of the vaxxes causing antibody dependent enhancement (ADE), as well as being the #1 factor in the continual arrival of variants. (Tons of footage exist with Fauci claiming these things. As well as tons of footage of everyone from Yeadon of the US, Montagnier of Europe to Delores Cahill of Ireland and Dr Robert Malone discussing the ADE and variants.)
https://forbiddenknowledgetv.net/107947-2/
It was in the news that the in-use PCR test was to be phased out Dec 31st 2021, with news announcements about it over this past summer of 2021.